Macron en Marche

An aide explained that his thoughts were too sublime to be comprehended by journalists, prompting the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné to print a spoof interview with Macron.
 Questioner: “So, it’s all over for interviews and press conferences?”
 Macron: “Affirmative. They will be replaced by the publication every month of a scan of my brain, so that the public may marvel at the complexity of my reasoning.”
 To critics, his lofty attitude recalls a remark made by Napoleon himself to his cabinet in 1804: “We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.”
 —News article on France’s new president by Michael Sheridan in the UK’s Sunday Times, July 9

I still do not have a handle on Emmanuel Macron.

The standard narrative of European state broadcasters and the American corporate media was that he was the political savior who brought voters to their senses after a string of witless decisions in Europe and the U.S. A surging tide of unfathomable populism and nationalism had caused a narrow victories for anti-European Union forces in Britain’s referendum last summer and for Donald Trump in November. Fear had been palpable that another unlikely surprise could result in the National Front’s Marine Le Pen ascending to the Elysée Palace in May. When Macron won the presidency handily, there were huzzahs all around. The E.U. and liberal democracy were safe. The epidemic of insanity was over.

Not so fast.

The funny thing is that, had there been a viable Socialist candidate in the race, I have no doubt Macron would have been painted by much of the press as some sort of populist reactionary. No more than the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., the long-running major French parties—the Socialists and the ever-name-changing Guallist/conservatives (currently called Les Républicains)—more or less imploded and/or at least ground to an intellectual halt from lack of inertia. Socialist François Hollande’s term was so disastrous that he did not bother running for re-election. Two other leftist candidates—one of whom was out of the mainstream even by French standards—divided the vote. On the right, François Fillon might well have won if not for an inconvenient scandal involving high-pay/low-duty jobs for his wife and children. So far neither he nor anyone else, by the way, has blamed the Russians for his defeat.

As it is, some have compared Macron to Barack Obama because of his youth, freshness, photogenic image and the fact that he represents a break from the political past. I wonder, though, whether a comparison with Trump is not more apt. After all, he had never before held elected office, he campaigned successfully against all the established political parties, and his agenda was always unabashedly pro-business. Still, all that mattered in the final round was that he was not Marine Le Pen, so he was clearly the good guy. Also, unlike Trump, he was pro-European-Union and did not emit untoward tweets or cringe-worthy off-the-cuff remarks. So far, by the way, Le Pen has not blamed her defeat on misogyny.

Like Trump, however, Macron seems to be finding that, while having no long-term well-established major party support can sometimes be an aid to election, it does not make it particularly easy to govern. Trump, a nominal Republican, arrived in Washington with majorities in both houses of Congress. Macron’s barely-year-old party La République en Marche swept the legislature. Yet, as an article in The Guardian this week notes, in Macron’s first full month in office, there were no fewer than four high-profile resignations and investigations into two separate scandals. His approval rating has dropped from 64 percent in June to 54 percent this week—lower than Hollande’s at this stage. Much of the drop has been among pensioners and France’s sizeable number of civil servants, that is, l’état profond (the deep state), as no one is actually calling it. Why? Because Macron actually seems to be doing what he promised—trying to reform the country’s bloated bureaucracy.

Whatever happens next, it will be fascinating to watch. After the last French election—in which the top finishers were a novice independent and a far-right nationalist—will France’s politics eventually revert back to tradition or will it all have to be reborn? Similarly in the U.S.—where one major party still does not seem to realize how unpopular it is on a national level and the other one is fragmenting into bickering factions—can things ever go back to “normal” again?

The collective sigh of relief over Macron’s electoral triumph may have been just a tad premature.

Autoimmune Response

“ ‘Washington Post’ Reporter Frustrated Every Space In Parking Garage Taken Up By Anonymous Source”
 —Headline from The Onion, May 30

The improbable rise and election of Donald Trump has flummoxed people so badly that they struggle to find some comparable historical figure to help make sense of him. Quite a few of the more excitable ones quickly reached for the almost-always-inadvisable Hitler comparison, as well as fascists like Benito Mussolini. Some went for Argentina’s populist crook Juan Perón. Others likened President Trump to his putative bromance partner Vladimir Putin. I myself wrote in this blog of a potential similarity to Italy’s buffoonish media magnate Silvio Berlusconi.

Lately another comparison has occurred to me, and I am confident few others have thought of it—Chile’s Salvador Allende. Sounds nuts, right? Politically, two men could not be further apart. If you have any admiration at all for one of them, you will certainly have no time at all for the other.

The late Chilean president has been on my mind because my novel authoring efforts have again transported me back to South America in the early 1970s. (Yes, I have indeed seized upon a topic that allows me to plug my available-real-soon-now third book.) Events of that era in Chile figured into the plot of my first novel, Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. They figure even more prominently in the sequel, which follows the further adventures of twentysomething Californian Dallas Green, who insists he is not interested in politics but keeps getting drawn into political situations anyway.

Indulge me with this Trump/Allende thing. First, let’s note the stark differences between them. Allende was a veteran politician and the head of a well-established political party, which was the Socialist Party. Trump is a businessman whose political views over time have been all over the map. His first ever elective office was president of the United States. He was elected on a platform that was pro-business and nationalistic. Allende, as a self-avowed Marxist, was very much into state control of the economy and spoke the language of international solidarity. The two are clearly poles apart ideologically—and that assumes Trump even has a real ideology.

So why do I see a correlation between the two? For one thing, both were presidents elected legally but by electoral minorities. Allende received just 36.6 percent of the popular vote, a slight purality ahead of Jorge Alessandri, the conservative independent candidate, who received 35.3 percent. The Chilean Congress functioned as an effective Electoral College, and the centrist Christian Democrats threw their votes to Allende. They came to regret that strategy. Nearly three years later they joined the rest of the political opposition to declare Allende’s presidency illegal. As for Trump, he of course won the Electoral College despite receiving only 46.1 percent of the popular vote.

In another parallel, both Allende and Trump caused alarm by perceived ties to foreign leaders. In Allende’s case, he was well known to be a personal friend of Fidel Castro. He was photographed several times holding an AK-47 Castro had given him as a gift. When the military came to oust him, he used that weapon to take his own life. (For years his supporters insisted he had been murdered, but eventually his family conceded that he had died by his own hand.) In Trump’s case, many observers were puzzled—if not outright unnerved—by the fact he was given to praising Vladimir Putin’s leadership and did not subject the Russian leader to the same outbursts he directed at most other world leaders. This hysteria continued to the point where Trump’s former campaign is being examined with an eye to possible collusion with the Russians and Trump himself has been reported to be a target for his possible interference.

The fundamental similarity between Trump and Allende is that each, in his own way, represented a threat to his society’s establishment. In Chile’s case, the conservative establishment—with support from the U.S. government—resisted him at every turn. Things reached a crisis when Congress condemned Allende for disregarding judicial rulings, ruling by decree, unlawfully confiscating land, and allowing his supporters to arm themselves while others were not so allowed. Three weeks later the military removed him and took control of the country.

In the current American case, it is the modern liberal establishment that cannot abide Trump. Talk of impeachment began before he was even inaugurated. From the outset, his administration has been undermined by a tide of leaks, not only from his own staff but from intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The leaking campaign extended as high as then-FBI director James Comey, who acknowledged in testimoney before Congress that he had leaked his version of a conversation with Trump with the (successful) intention of triggering a special counsel investigation. That investigation is headed by Comey’s personal friend and longtime colleague Robert Mueller. He has a sterling reputation, not unlike Comey’s, although Comey’s has suffered some since his recent testimony, where he came off more as an insider schemer than the boy scout had seemed before. As for Mueller, some are now looking askance at the fact that his hires for the probe are tending heavily toward those on record for having donated generously to Democratic candidates and political action committees. Moreover, the investigation is unusual in that, as far as I can remember anyway, it is the first one which is trying to establish whether a crime was actually committed as opposed to investigating a crime that has already been established as having been committed.

If there is one overriding similarity between Allende and Trump, it is that their presidencies both evoke the image of a foreign organism pushing its way into the body politic like a pathogen, causing a furious reaction from antibodies trying to ward off the infection. In Allende’s case, it was conservative society, businesses and the military that reacted. In Trump’s case, it is the Democratic party, the corporate media and, most of all, the legions of entrenched career government employees to whom some refer as the “deep state.”

What seems to be forgotten in the heated political environment is that, in a democracy, the political leader you revile was put there by millions of people. Allende may have been a threat to Chilean democracy, but he was supported by a large segment of the population. Many of his supporters wound up being imprisoned, tortured, killed or forced into exile.

What has gotten precious little acknowledgement since the U.S. election is the fact that nearly 63 million people voted for Donald Trump. Those voters had not seen their most serious concerns, fears and problems recognized and treated seriously by politicians of either major party. Rightly or wrongly, they tried to send a message by electing a president opposed by the establishments of both parties. If they turn on the news or pick up a newspaper—and who knows how many of them even bother anymore—what do they see?

Maybe some number of them read the president’s tweets and/or blogs sympathetic to him and still urge him on. Those who do not, on the other hand, must see little sign that their message in November was received or taken to heart by anyone in Washington or the corporate media.

Pot, Meet Kettle

“We published several … emails which show Podesta responding to a phishing email. Podesta gave out that his password was the word ‘password.’ His own staff said this email that you’ve received, this is totally legitimate. So, this is something … a 14-year-old kid could have hacked Podesta that way.”
 —Wilileaks founder Julian Assange, in a Fox News Channel interview on January 3

Remember when conservatives and foreign policy hawks were the ones who lost their heads over covert Russian influence and infiltration in American society?

Now it is seemingly every politician, pundit and blogger to the left of center suggesting President Trump is a some sort of Manchurian candidate. Is he?

The term is a reference to Richard Condon’s 1959 novel and its 1962 film adaptation by John Frankenheimer. The book was adapted again thirteen years ago by the late Jonathan Demme. A paranoid thriller, the story is about a young scion of a prominent political family who, while serving his country in the Korean War, is captured by Soviets and brainwashed to act on their behalf of the Communists when he goes on to a political career.

I do not think anyone seriously believes the president was ever brainwashed in the manner of Laurence Harvey in the 1962 movie (Liev Schreiber in the 2004 one). I think what some people suspect (or perhaps hope) is that it may turn out that the president has a concrete reason not to go against Vladimir Putin’s international interests for personal financial reasons. Maybe the president would hope to benefit from business interests in Russia, according to one line of speculation. Another is that the Russians may even have funneled money to his political campaign. After all it has been pretty well documented that the Russians have done a lot of meddling in electoral campaigns in western countries. They were clearly involved in the hacking and leaking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers.

Will we find out the truth about the president’s collusion or non-collusion with the Russkies? The good news is that the appointment of former Robert Mueller director Robert Mueller as special counsel will be our best shot at finding out in a way that will satisfy most reasonable people—if there are any left. The problem is that we could be waiting years for the answer.

Donald Trump has had a more raucous beginning to his presidency than any of his recent predecessors, but administrations being under investigation is actually pretty run-of-the-mill. Ronald Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had Whitewater, which somehow veered into his affair with Monica Lewinsky and impeachment. George W. Bush had the Valerie Plame affair, which resulted in no prosecution for the official who actually outed her but did for someone who gave the wrong answers in the course of the investigation. President Obama did not have to deal with a special counsel, but his Secretary of State was investigated by the FBI after she left office.

Unfortunately for Democrats in hindsight, they nominated her as their presidential candidate anyway. That fact betrays a huge amount of hypocrisy among Democratic politicians and their media supporters. Their cries of indignation about the current president letting slip classified info to the Russian diplomats in the Oval Office ring a bit hollow when they insisted for months it was no big deal when much larger amounts of such sensitive information sat for years on an unsecured computer server in Secretary Clinton’s home.

Their new concern about Russian meddling and ambitions also comes off as more than a little opportunistic. Even if the Trump campaign is found to have, say, gotten money from the Russians, it is hard to imagine they could have find the current administration any more compliant than the Obama administration. No one has ever accused Barack Obama of being on the take with the Russians, but his administration was observedly less than aggressive with Moscow on the international front. Whether it was the Crimea invasion or threatening then backtracking on Syria or unilaterally withdrawing defensive missiles from Eastern Europe in exchange for no concessions, he gave Putin a good deal more than once. There was nothing nefarious about it, though. The fact was he needed Putin’s cooperation in order to secure his cherished nuclear deal with Iran. All other foreign policy considerations seemed subservient to that goal.

So what if the Trump people are found to have taken Russian money? After all, it could conceivably happen. This sort of thing is not unprecedented. In 1997 the Justice Department investigated the funneling of Chinese money into the Clinton/Gore campaign, Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund, and some Democratic congressional campaigns. In the end the Justice Department, which of course reported to Bill Clinton, dropped the investigation. Calls for an independent counsel were ignored. Congressional investigations eventually fell apart under the weight of partisan squabbling. Years later Bill Clinton collected multi-million-dollar fees from the Chinese for a series of speeches while his wife was Secretary of State.

If any of the considerable smoke in the Trump presidency results in legitimate fire, one hopes that justice will take its proper course. When it comes to passing judgment, however, it is hard to imagine a more imperfect messenger than the Democratic Party.